WILLIAM BROWNE OF OTTERY
In the Threnæ or funeral songs and elegies of our old poets, I am often impressed with the idea of their resemblance to hired weepers in Rome and among the Irish, where he who howled the loudest and most wildly was the most capital mourner and was at the head of his trade. So [too] see William Browne's elegy on Prince Henry (Britt. Past. Songs v.), whom, perhaps, he never spoke to. Yet he is a dear fellow, and I love him, that W. Browne who died at Ottery, and with whose family my own is united, or, rather, connected and acquainted.
[Colonel James Coleridge, the poet's eldest surviving brother and Henry Langford Browne of Combe-Satchfield married sisters, Frances and Dorothy Taylor, whose mother was one of five co-heiresses of Richard Duke of Otterton.
It is uncertain whether a William Browne of Ottery St. Mary, who died in 1645, was the author of The Shepherd's Pipe and Britannia's Pastorals. Two beautiful inscriptions on a tomb in St. Stephen's Chapel in the collegiate church of St. Mary Ottery, were, in Southey's opinion (doubtless at Coleridge's suggestion), composed by the poet William Browne.]
"ASCEND A STEP IN CHOOSING A FRIEND" TALMUD
God knows! that at times I derive a comfort even from my infirmities, my sins of omission and commission, in the joy of the deep feeling of the opposite virtues in the two or three whom I love in my heart of hearts. Sharp, therefore, is the pain when I find faults in these friends opposite to my virtues. I find no comfort in the notion of average, for I wish to love even more than to be beloved, and am so haunted by the conscience of my many failings that I find an unmixed pleasure in esteeming and admiring, but, as the recipient of esteem or admiration, I feel as a man, whose good dispositions are still alive, feels in the enjoyment of a darling property on a doubtful title. My instincts are so far dog-like that I love beings superior to myself better than my equals. But the notion of inferiority is so painful to me that I never, in common life, feel a man my inferior except by after-reflection. What seems vanity in me is in great part attributable to this feeling. But of this hereafter. I will cross-examine myself.
A CAUTION TO POSTERITY
There are actions which left undone mark the greater man; but to have done them does not imply a bad or mean man. Such, for instance, are Martial's compliments of Domitian. So may we praise Milton without condemning Dryden. By-the-bye, we are all too apt to forget that contemporaries have not the same wholeness, and fixedness in their notions of persons' characters, that we their posterity have. They can hope and fear and believe and disbelieve. We make up an ideal which, like the fox or lion in the fable, never changes.
FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE"
I have several times seen the stiletto and the rosary come out of the same pocket.
A man who marries for love is like a frog who leaps into a well. He has plenty of water but then he cannot get out.
[Not until national ruin is imminent will Ministers contemplate the approach of national danger]; as if Judgment were overwhelmed like Belgic towns in the sea, and showed its towers only at dead low water.
The superiority of the genus to the particular may be illustrated by music. How infinitely more perfect in passion and its transition than even poetry, and poetry again than painting! And yet how marvellous is genius in all its implements!
[Compare Table Talk, July 6, 1833. H. N. C. foot-note. Bell & Co., 1884, p. 240.]
Those only who feel no originality, no consciousness of having received their thoughts and opinions from immediate inspiration are anxious to be thought original. The certainty, the feeling that he is right, is enough for the man of genius, and he rejoices to find his opinions plumed and winged with the authority of several forefathers.
The water-lily in the midst of the lake is equally refreshed by the rain, as the sponge on the sandy sea-shore.
In the next world the souls of dull good men serve for bodies to the souls of the Shaksperes and Miltons, and in the course of a few centuries, when the soul can do without its vehicle, the bodies will by advantage of good company have refined themselves into souls fit to be clothed with like bodies.
How much better it would be, in the House of Commons, to have everything that is, and by the spirit of English freedom must be legal, legal and open! The reporting, for instance, should be done by shorthandists appointed by Government. There are, I see, weighty arguments on the other side, but are they not to be got over?
Co-arctation is not a bad phrase for that narrowing in of breadth on both sides as in my interpolation of Schiller.
"And soon
The narrowing line of day-light that ran after
The closing door was gone."
Piccolomini, ii. sc. 4, P.W., p. 257.
THE DEVIL WITH A MEMORY THE FIRST SINNER
In order not to be baffled by the infinite ascent of the heavenly angels, the devil feigned that all (the ταγαθου, that is, God himself included) sprang from nothing. And now he has a pretty task to multiply, without paper or slate, the exact number of all the animalcules, and the eggs and embryos of each planet, by some other, and the product by a third and that product by a fourth, and he is not to stop till he has gone through the planets of half the universe, the number of which being infinite, it is considered by the devils in general a great puzzle. A dream in a doze.
THE SUN OF RIGHTEOUSNESS
A bodily substance, an unborrowed Self—God in God immanent! The Eternal Word! That goes forth yet remains! Crescent and Full and Wane, yet ever entire and one, it dawns, and sets, and crowns the height of heaven. At the same time, the dawning and setting sun, at the same time the zodiac—while each, in its own hour, boasts and beholds the exclusive Presence, a peculiar Orb, each the great Traveller's inn, yet still the unmoving Sun—
Great genial Agent in all finite souls;
And by that action puts on finiteness,
Absolute Infinite, whose dazzling robe
Flows in rich folds, and plays in shooting hues
Of infinite finiteness.
FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE." Syracuse, September 26, 1805
I was standing gazing at the starry heaven, and said, "I will go to bed, the next star that shoots." Observe this, in counting fixed numbers previous to doing anything, and deduce from man's own unconscious acknowledgment man's dependence on something more apparently and believedly subject to regular and certain laws than his own will and reason.
To Wordsworth in the progression of spirit, once Simonides, or Empedocles, or both in one—
"Oh! that my spirit, purged by death of its weaknesses, which are, alas! my identity, might flow into thine, and live and act in thee and be thine!"
Death, first of all, eats of the Tree of Life and becomes immortal. Describe the frightful metamorphosis. He weds the Hamadryad of the Tree [and begets a twy-form] progeny. This in the manner of Dante.
Sad drooping children of a wretched parent are those yellowing leaflets of a broken twig, broke ere its June.
We are not inert in the grave. St. Paul's corn in the ground proves this scripturally, and the growth of infants in their sleep by natural analogy. What, then, if our spiritual growth be in proportion to the length and depth of the sleep! With what mysterious grandeur does not this thought invest the grave, and how poor compared with this an immediate Paradise!
I awake and find my beloved asleep, gaze upon her by the taper that feebly illumines the darkness, then fall asleep by her side; and we both awake together for good and all in the broad daylight of heaven.
Forget not to impress as often and as manifoldly as possible the totus in omni